Google News is Getting the Date Wrong on Old News Stories
Posted on September 16th, 2008by Michael Gray in Google
Last week there was a bit of a brouhaha over Google news incorrectly giving the wrong date for a news story. In that particular incident Google news picked up a 6 year old story about United Airlines filing bankruptcy which upset the stock market for that particular stock. I’ve seen things like that happen before in the past despite Google saying that it was an isolated incident. Here’s an example of where Google News is still assigning the wrong date.
do the following query in Google News [inurl:2007 site:nytimes.com]
In the screen shot below take note of the dates Google is assigning to the two stories September 14, 2008 and September 4, 2008.
Now visit the actual pages those two stories are on and notice the original publication date
Vintage Neil Young, Still Working for the Muse
Google is assigning a date of September 14 2008 for a news story that was published on August 24 2007, and September 4th of 2008 for a story that was published on October 28, 2007.
Big deal you say? Well What if I’m in the financial market and as part of my job I have to monitor HRJ Capital, and I go to Google News and search for them [HRJ Capital] I get that story that was originally published on August 24, 2007 but that Google thinks was published on September 14th 2008. Do you see how assigning the wrong date to old news could cause a problem?
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September 16th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Hey Michael,
The same issue has been going on for months on Google Reader as well. The only difference I see is that when a new comment is added Google Reader makes the date the same as the latest post. So it could be a similar issue on Google News as well.
~ Chris
September 16th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
[...] Gray noticed that Google News is continuously indexing old stories on some sites as new stories. Yes, this is [...]
September 16th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
[...] Greywolf SEO has been doggedly tracking down the Googleclaim that it was a one off, and has found other examples. Google is assigning a date of September 14 2008 for a news story that was published on August 24 [...]
September 16th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Interesting. Using your example, I only see the story for Neil Young. This incident does seem different than the UAL one in that the NYT includes a publication date. I thought maybe it was a recent comment that triggered the new date, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Maybe it’s the “var google_hints” that is triggering it
September 16th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
In my capital markets research, I’ve been noticing this problem for some time now. In some cases, I think some web portals are obscuring the date in order to make their content seem “timeless” or always relevant. It makes research frustrating because the true dates of events starts to become obscured. Sounds like we need a webservice call OrigPubOn: or something. We need to preserve the actual dates of news and insights that are delivered to the web and not be beholden to the date that Google crawls it.
September 17th, 2008 at 4:27 am
One of my clients works in the commodities and futures markets, relying on and releasing news all the time - they’re going to be miffed when I tell them this as it might make readers think that they are trying to rehash/repackage old news…
September 17th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Is it possible that the news site did republish the story (and by publish, I mean updated the HTML so the “HEAD” date is new) such that Google picked it up again and is listing the most recent update time rather than the original publish time? Maybe they need two fields: original date and last updated date.
That also fits in line with what folks above and myself have seen with Google Reader behavior.
September 17th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
A report I wrote about a Jewish Holocaust survivor in 2006 turned up on Google in July with a new publish date.
The family found the story about their mother, who died in 2007, in 2008.
As a result, we were able to connect and talk about the legacy their mother had left behind. It’s not always negative when Google glitches, but it can have extremely deep and emotional impacts on families.
September 17th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Mike,
The Sun-Sentinel, the site that is the purported source of Google’s ‘old news’ reported as ‘new news’ fiasco, doesn’t have a critcal element in place on their pages:
AND - the Popular Stories section (3 or 4 items down from the top of the right column) does not have ‘nofollow’ in the listed links (although, it seems that the sun-sentinel.com site does have a ‘nofollow’ policy, as evident in other links on the home page). This is where, apparently, the headline appeared when Google scraped and distributed the story.
Do you think these two elements, used properly, could have thwarted Evil Google’s plan to bring down the Tribune and United Airlines?
It’s just an idea.
SEO Chatter
September 17th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Sorry, I forgot to alter the code in my last post. The critical element I’m referring to is
September 18th, 2008 at 7:15 am
Mike, I think you miss the point here on the “nofollow” and even placement of a date on a news story (many times I see the URL or the title tag carrying this). So many people seem to think THEY NEED to please, pacify or meet the Google guidelines if they want included in the index, but instead we see Google pickup on content/links that actually break the very rules they are imposing. MAYBE Google can’t do their job properly and index and sift the world’s content and expect us to meet their algo. Sorry, but this event for United Airlines, the examples posted just show how irrelevant that Google is becoming, and then use “suggestions” to web sites to meet their failing also. (Twitter is another fine example)
I for one am growing tired of Google this and Google that. I am sorry to say but I think we can expect US and Euro involvement/regulations coming to the WildWildWeb since we have many that game, others that just can’t contain the content released to the world.
David
October 9th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
[...] “2008″ in the search query. The only problem with this is Google have in the past had problems with dates in the search results so that could be one to watch out for Share and [...]